I got a letter from BT saying I should sign for Infinity

Ive been a customer using O2 on their LLU for the last 6 years. I left IDNET 8 MB package then as their service went down the pan at that time and the customer support was poor. So far I have been ecstatically happy with the service from o2 as so very very little goes wrong with it and I enjoy a sync speed of 16.9 MB which is more than adequate for me.

Yesterday I received a letter from BT outlining what id get if I signed up for Infinity. The letter said I could expect to receive a 33.6 MB connection which sounds nice, but.....................a lot of years ago I was with BT and they were dreadful.One of the knockout blows in O2`s favour is that support is 101 % UK based.....a godsend. When I was with BT , any time I had to ring support I got an indian or south african 1st line of support operative and I almost threw my phone through the wall several times.

Now that the honeymoon period is over, those who went to BT Infinity from another ISP, did it live up to the quality assurances from BT, and if you needed support , did you get foreign based or uk based help ? In my opinion the foreign based support is a total deal breaker.

In reply to a post by bilbo8:

to BT Infinity from another ISP,

To be clear, only BT Retail do BT Infinity; it's their product name for FTTC. Other ISPs do FTTC.

Plenty of people will have varying experiences, but here's mine.

I went from UK Online to AAISP FTTC (as one of the first people connected to one of the first exchanges I didn't trust that a LLU->FTTC migration would go simply - as it turns out I was right to do this as it took quite some time to get the migration through, but AAISP more than lived up to their reputation).
After a year with AAISP, I migrated to BT Infinity Opt 2, purely because of the cost savings (and once they billed it as unlimited). I have to say that I have not regretted the move. But - I've had no reason to contact them for support.
The upside is this - I get full speed 100% of the time (I'm 50 metres from the cab so sync at full speed). The latency is more than acceptable - a pretty consistent 12ms to bbc.co.uk, which is better than AAISP and on a par with what I had with UKO.
And I have, on occasion, hammered the connection with massive downloads - as far as I can tell it lives up to it's unlimited tag. Of course they throttle raw torrents but that's not a huge issue for me. As far as I have been able to tell, all other traffic types are pretty much unconstrained.

I have had to deal with BT's offshore support on other occasions (not BB faults) and my experiences have largely been OK - not fantastic, just OK. The key seems to be patience and persistence, they will escalate you back to the UK eventually - but note that I'm not the sort to get easily frustrated.

So at the risk of it all falling apart tomorrow, I'd have to give it the thumbs up.

Mark

Are you happy with your 16Megabits and do you really need more? If i was closer to the exchange and had 16Megabits or even 10 I would not bother with fibre.
a mate of mine who uses the same network as me ( able and wireless LLU) gets 18megabits and is said he may go for fibre when it comes here, saying that I don't think they will update where he is for a while as he is so close tot he exchange.


I would stay as you are if I was in your position. i expect when fibre come here I will be bombarded with leaflets from BT, and talk talk they both been quiet for a while.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In reply to a post by bilbo8:

to BT Infinity from another ISP,

To be clear, only BT Retail do BT Infinity; it's their product name for FTTC. Other ISPs do FTTC.

I think the OP was clear - he was asking if anyone who had left another ISP to go to BT Infinity rather than go to BT Infinity provided by another ISP which is how you read it.

Ah, OK!

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Ah, OK!

Actually it wasn't that clear at all Your reading was probably correct based on how he wrote it rather than my interpretation which is what I think he meant to ask.

What about BT Business - UK based support, but with a Scottish accent most of the time! And support is excellent.

I thought BT Business generally liked you to be also using a BT Business line rental product? Or has cold slowed my brain down

Hey, I moved from O2 which gave me a stonking 3-4 megs on a 59db line. [When with Orange, but via BT, I often ended up at 135-160k for weeks on end!).

O2 were great, not a moments bother, and generally speeds in the range above.

Moved to Infinity, and get 37.5 megs via ethernet (and around 20 megs on wireless g). This has been stable and at this speed since November. On the couple of occassions the speed dropped (down was only 6megs and up was still 8megs), a call to offshore immediately escalated it back to the UK and whatever it was got sorted very quickly (excellent performance this time). To be fair, the BT site did say there was engineering work going on the night before each of the issues, and I wonder if there was simply a delay in information propagating around routers etc. They also called me the next day to see if it was sorted.

The only question for you is I suspect is not the download speed, but the 10 megs upload - which I can say does help things greatly. Emails zip off in a flash, photos load up to Flickr etc in a blink of an eye - makes life so much better, believe me - I did not even think it was an issue until I switched!

And of course, there is also the 80 megs on the horizon too.

As others have indicated, most cabs only have 288 fibre connections, so in high demand areas, these can be used up quite quickly, and then you won't have a choice. My cab only has 144, so I jumped in asap as we have loads of houses here on the estate.

Hope this helps,

Rob